With illegal logging and agricultural expansion closing in on their lands, four Indigenous Wounaan and Emberá-Wounaan villages in Panama’s Darién forest started a biodiversity monitoring project to document their forests’ conservation status.Their biodiversity monitoring project recorded more than 200 species across 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of threatened forest.They’re now using the data as a baseline for joining the biodiversity credits market — a nascent arm of the nature finance industry that’s being touted as a way to help pay for conservation.Although biodiversity credit advocates say this market has learned from the mistakes of the carbon credit markets, observers say it’s still too soon to evaluate if it will deliver on its promises.
When Elsa Quiroz saw the spotted body of a jaguar appear on her son’s computer screen, she couldn’t believe her eyes. “I’d only seen them in books,” she said. In late 2025, a camera captured the animal crossing a semi-abandoned path in Puerto Lara, a an Indigenous Wounaan village north of Panama’s Darien forest, close to the Pan-American Highway, an area known for its rich biodiversity. The community was aware of how many birds lived around them, but not of the jaguars.
